In a recent MEDCITY News article written by Dan Verel, he discusses a partnership between the Stanford School of Medicine and SAP. The mission of the partnership is to “explore genetics role in chronic conditions.” Dr. Carolos Bustamante, head of Stanford’s Genetics department, believes the benefits of this genetic data could be extraordinary for many stakeholders in the health care industry. Dr. Bustamante said “benefits range from possible learning why certain drugs never make it out of clinical trials because of what population they are tested on, to a more inclusive global snapshot of differing populations and what drives their health spending.”

A main aspect of the Stanford and SAP partnership is the processing of the data. “SAP is providing the platform and the software to help speed that process, and Stanford says it has seen computations between 17 and 600 times faster in analyzing its genomics data.” Big data has the ability to reduce healthcare costs by finding the root-causes of many chronic conditions, including diabetes and LDL cholesterol. The upsides of genetic data sharing are undeniable. “Now the effort of sharing that data needs to be appropriately scaled.”